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Any fan of majestic extreme doom should make (geological) time to get familiar with Russian label Solitude Productions. If you like four-minute songs just fine, but your salivary glands kick into overdrive for tracks that leave the eleven-minute mark in the dust, you're the target market. It's easy to get lost in to celestial movements dragged into being by bands like Waters of Lethe, The Howling Void (not be confused with Ryan Lipynsky's Howling Wind project), and Abstract Spirit. This music's not for everyone, and probably not for anyone all of the time, but at the right moments that slow darkness is simply devastating.
I've been a fan of Septic Mind's gruesome crawl since a fellow music writer turned me on to The Beginning back in 2010. Without my foreknowledge, the band heaved out their third record, Rab, just a few weeks ago, and I'm in love all over again.

Rab includes just enough of that haunting crush to be recognizable as Septic Mind, but there's a new thrust to the record - in the middle of "Blizost' Kontakta," all up in the guitar tones of "Na Poroge Peremen" - that redesigns the band's sound and places it well beyond simple funeral doom boundaries. As their Bandcamp page suggests, Septic Mind's new work includes, "tempo variations, passages from meditation to fury, from canonic funeral doom metal to avantgarde psychedelic experiments."